Chomsky: The war on drugs criminalizes the poor

A few days ago, Noam Chomsky took part in a conference on the achievements of civil organizations in the United States for the rights of racial minorities, which stated that the failed drug war is a strategy of the white establishment to perpetuate differences class. After remembering Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers (who, for the intellectual, was as large as that of Nelson Mandela against apartheid importance) said that "there are things that the white liberal establishment does not want to be part of history. "This refers to what Chomsky calls" the criminalization of black life. " After the black or African American population no longer be used as slave labor in the nineteenth century, the way to agree to improvements in their quality of life and civil rights was found opposite to the Second World War: African Americans were able to work within the work force and "war industries" that led to substantial economic growth in the subsequent decades, during the 50s and 60s of last century, the black population "might work in the auto factories, do something money, buy a house. And during those same 20 years, the civil rights movement took off. " For Chomsky, "the movement of blacks reached its limit when it became a matter of class." The middle class of African Americans (and other racial minorities such as Latinos) posed a threat to white hegemony: "There is a close correlation of class-race, but as matters of blacks and Latinos began to reach the barriers class, there was a great reaction. Part of this was the reinstitution of the criminalization of black people in the late ’70s. "Most of the prey population in the U.S. is African American or Latino origin and" is not based on crime "because, for Chomsky , "the device that was used to recriminalizar the black population was drugs. The drug war is a fraud, a total fraud. It has nothing to do with drugs, drug prices will not change. In what has been successful the war on drugs is the criminalization of the poor. And the poor in America are being mostly black or Latino. "For the intellectual, in fact, the war on drugs" is a war of race. " "Almost entirely, from the outset, the orders given to the police on how to deal with the drugs were ‘not going to the suburbs and arrest the racer white bag snorts coke in the afternoon, but you’re going to the ghettos, and if a guy has a joint in your pocket, you put in jail. " So start with the police action, not police itself, but orders they were given. " "Then there are sentences that are grossly disproportionate, then the highly punitive system is instituted later, then if someone gets out of prison" because to Chomsky, "prisons are about one thing: punishment. They only learn one thing in prison, which is to be criminals. "Their conclusion was that the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement" can not be denied, but we must not overlook the fact that set in motion forces that would seek to reverse these changes to protect class privilege &quot